The present disclosure relates to monitoring the operation of applications hosted on cloud-based architectures. In particular, the present disclosure relates to systems and methods for monitoring the operation of applications that operate in cloud environments.
The use and proliferation of software, platform, infrastructure services that are distributed over the cloud, such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), have become increasingly popular. While these services have vastly simplified the process of deploying and scaling applications, particularly complex ones, they present very challenging problems when it comes to monitoring the performance of applications deployed using these cloud-based services/platforms. For example, it is generally very difficult to monitor the performance of the applications and the hardware resources they utilize in real-time because access to performance information for the cloud platform components is generally very limited. For example, little information about how the servers, storage, and networking systems of the cloud-based architecture is often even available or accessible to a customer that is using it to host an application, so it can be difficult and/or impossible to determine whether the user's application or the cloud-based architecture is the source of any performance issues, bottlenecks, or downtime. Moreover, any performance information that is available is often limited, stale, and/or sampled down so it doesn't provide a complete or detailed enough picture of any issues that may arise.
Further, applications deployed on these highly distributed computing services are often very complex and dynamic. However, these computing services provide little visibility over major parts of their stacks (e.g., layers 1-3). In addition, because IT staff may not have access to the underlying hardware and systems of these computing services, they are unable to effectively monitor these devices for issues. Consequently, when issues arise, the IT staff often struggle to find answers to critical questions such as what the impact to their customers will be, when they can expect to run out of capacity, whether the issue is a network or application issue, what the root cause of issue is, and what the priority or impact of the issue is.
In addition, existing application performance monitoring solutions, including dedicated networking devices and appliances, have had difficulty adapting to monitoring applications on these cloud-based services. This is due in part to the dynamically changing infrastructure, the distributed architecture, and the different languages and/or services offered by the cloud-based services, which require constant reconfiguration of the existing solutions. In addition, existing solutions can themselves contribute to latency and bottlenecks because they require network traffic be specifically routed through them so they can take data samples. As a result, traditional application performance monitoring solutions have generally been unable to provide effective and efficient monitoring of applications deployed via these cloud-based services.
Thus there is a need for a solution that provides real-time, informative, and comprehensive application performance monitoring on cloud-based services.